


We Do What We Always Do

by MoreThanSlightly (cadignan)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 13:12:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14521308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadignan/pseuds/MoreThanSlightly
Summary: “I can’t get drunk,” Steve says, lifting his hands in apology.“Not with that attitude,” Natasha says, and she’s clearly had a lot. “Shuri made this with superhuman biology in mind. She’s drowning her sorrows in projects. We’re drowning our sorrows the regular way.”





	We Do What We Always Do

The death reports roll in for what feels like a century, and Steve should know. He might as well be back under the ice. The numbers climb, things get worse, and he feels nothing. There is no _worse_ anymore.

He had to watch Bucky die. Again.

Dimly, Steve knows he should care about the rest of the world. The universe. He’s trying. That skinny kid who got up after being beaten down, that’s who he needs to be right now. These people—everyone who’s left—that’s who they need him to be. They want to hear him say _we’ll get up_ , _we’ll fight this_. He can scrape out what’s left of his insides and shape it into a rousing speech. _Thanos is just one more bully_ , he’ll tell them. _Things look bad now but we’ll get him in the end!_ Maybe Steve can dress up in a flag and punch out a guy in a purple costume a few dozen times. That’ll get their spirits up.

He hacks out a desperate laugh and drops his head into his hands. He can’t do any of that. He can’t. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed in the Wakandan palace fully dressed, because he doesn’t have the energy to take off his fucking shoes. He’s ice all the way through.

Bucky said his name at the end. He’s remembered it so many times he can’t even be sure it really happened. What had it sounded like? Steve is losing it already, the raspy depth of Bucky’s voice, underused in his resurrected life but as wry as always. That last word, though—the tenor of it—had been something else. Only one syllable, a vanishing breath into the air, but it weighs on Steve. Bucky had reached out to him in the last moment of his life, calling his name out like a plea, and Steve hadn’t been there.

_Plus ça_ fucking _change…_

And just like last time, there’s a war on and no time for his feelings. Except this doesn’t feel much like that war, because back then they’d had the thinnest scrap of a chance in Hell.

His eyes are dry. He cried once, right after, from the shock of it. Since then, nothing. It’s too big for tears. But he wipes at his eyes reflexively, because he should be crying, and that’s when he sees the note under the door.

It’s Natasha’s handwriting. He hasn’t seen much of her. Once there were no more injured Wakandans to haul off the battlefield, she kept to herself. They’re all licking their wounds, human and alien alike. Nobody has come up with a plan, because that’s Steve’s job, and he can’t fucking do it.

He goes to Natasha’s room and finds Thor sitting on the bed with her. They have a large bottle of something, and there are more on the floor. They don’t exactly smile at him—good, he wouldn’t be able to return the gesture—but they do pat the bed.

“We’re moving to a different stage of grief,” Natasha says.

“I can’t get drunk,” Steve says, lifting his hands in apology.

“Not with that attitude,” Natasha says, and she’s clearly had a lot. “Shuri made this with superhuman biology in mind. She’s drowning her sorrows in projects. We’re drowning our sorrows the regular way.”

She demonstrates.

Steve can’t think of anything else to do, so he sits on the bed with them, keeping a polite distance. Thor grabs him around the waist and hauls him closer. He must be pretty far gone too, since he lays his head on Steve’s shoulder. His arm doesn’t move from its position around Steve’s waist. It’s like using one of those weighted blankets that twenty-first-century therapists are always recommending, except it’s made of Asgardian god. A permanent hug.

Thor is heavy and warm and drunk. He raises his free hand, the one that’s not clamped onto Steve, and takes a drink from his own bottle of whatever Shuri brewed.

“My brother,” Thor murmurs. “And before that, my best friend and my sister and my father and my mother and my homeland.”

God, it’s so much. Too much. How can he bear it? How can any of them bear it? “I’m sorry,” Steve says, because he is, but it will never be enough.

“I’m drinking to them,” Thor says, as if Steve is slow on the uptake. “Join me.”

Natasha raises her bottle in silent salute, but doesn’t name her own sorrows. Steve wonders what names she might list, and if Bucky’s might be among them, or Sam’s. There are so many to mourn that it feels unbelievably selfish to pick one person.

_Steve_ , Bucky had said, as the life was ebbing from his disintegrating body.

There’s no picking. Steve is sadder about one person than all the rest, and he’s got no goddamn choice about it. He’s always been wired that way and it nearly lost them the war the first time around. There’s no Peggy here to pull him out of the bombed-out bar, because she’s dead too. And that has never stopped hurting, and the way things are going, it never will. Steve takes the bottle out of Thor’s hand and fits his lips to the opening. He pours it down his throat and it burns.

“I saw my brother die before,” Thor says. “Somehow every time I mourn him is worse than the last.”

Steve passes the bottle back and says, “I know.”

“Boys always wanna talk about their feelings,” Natasha mumbles, and then she curls around a pillow at the other end of the massive bed and goes to sleep. Steve leans forward to grab her bottle before it spills, impressed. He hasn’t really slept since it happened. He’s closed his eyes and held his body still in bed, but that’s it. Sometimes it’s the worst part of the day, lying alone in the darkness, and that’s saying something, because he’s spent the past few days clearing the dead from a muddy field.

He takes another drink, and Thor says, “Do you? Want to talk about your feelings? I will honor your wishes on the subject.”

“I wouldn’t know what to say,” Steve says. But between Thor’s radiant body heat and the fire of the liquor, the ice is beginning to melt, so he adds, “Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead.”

Saying it out loud is excruciating and freeing all at once. The glacier cracks.

“Not that I don’t care about you,” Steve clarifies, and now he knows he’s drunk. “Or Natasha. Or the world.”

“But you loved him,” Thor says. “I know. I’m fifteen hundred years old.”

“He said my name. At the end. He said my name and there was _nothing_ I could do.” Steve’s voice shakes with a sob he hasn’t let out yet. His eyes are wet. “I should have—”

Thor covers his mouth with a hand. “Don’t blame yourself.”

Steve wrenches Thor’s hand away and moves so Thor has to lift his head up and they can look each other in the eyes. “How are you doing on that count? You feel fine about how it all went down? You sure you did everything right?”

“Of course not,” Thor says. “But he said your name because he loved you, and in the last moment of his life, you were what mattered to him. You should respect that.” He sounds so mournful on this point that Steve can't marshal a response. Thor lays his head back down immediately and nudges Steve, which really means he just squeezes Steve a little tighter around the middle, and drunkenly stage-whispers, “This is the part where you tell me not to blame myself.”

“Oh. Are we doing that? Will it help?”

“No. But say it anyway.”

“It wasn’t your fault. I don’t need to have been there to know that, Thor.” Steve says it with so much conviction he almost sounds sober. He believes it. Thor is a real hero. He would never have let someone he loved die in front of him if he could have prevented it. The problem is, Steve’s drunk now and his insides are melting, so he can’t stop fearful, ugly thoughts from sliding out of his mouth. It comes out quiet, because Steve doesn’t want it to be true. “If you couldn’t stop him, he can’t be stopped.”

“None of us,” Thor says, as quiet as Steve. “We worked together and we still failed.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Steve says. “And you’re in here getting drunk with me, so you don’t know what to do either.”

They drink in silence for a long time after that. Steve wishes Natasha were awake. She would have told them to shut the fuck up before saying those things out loud. But she’s peacefully asleep at the other end of the bed, looking sweeter than she ever has while awake, and Steve is horribly, selfishly glad that Natasha’s still here. He’s come to depend on her in ways he can’t explain. He has some stupid leadership role in their strange amalgam of gods and robots and mutants, but she’s the real heart of the team, this human woman who never gives anything away. She’s not a damn thing like Peggy, except for how if Steve thinks about her for more than a second, he gets choked with admiration in a way she’d never let him live down. Natasha is the toughest thing alive. She never needed a serum or a suit or a hammer to take on the universe.

Natasha’s going to get up tomorrow, having gotten plastered on highly advanced Wakandan booze with a super soldier and a god, and she’s not going to complain about her hangover. She’s going to ask him what the plan is. And if Steve doesn’t have an answer, she’ll tell him that they’re gonna kill Thanos or die trying, and he’ll have to agree.

“I’d say there’s nothing left to lose, but if the past few days have taught me anything, it’s that there’s always something left to lose,” Thor says. “But I told Thanos he’d die for killing Heimdall, and I don’t intend to die an oathbreaker.”

Steve nods. “Then we do what we always do. We fight.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tenderness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15692304) by [MoreThanSlightly (cadignan)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cadignan/pseuds/MoreThanSlightly)




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